A child version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS;D. Watson, L. A. Clark, & A. Tellegen, 1988), the PANAS-C, was developed using students in Grades 4-8 (N = 707). Item selection was based on psychometric and theoretical grounds. The resulting Negative Affect (NA) and Positive Affect (PA) scales demonstrated good convergent and discriminant validity with existing self-report measures of childhood anxiety and depression; the PANAS-C performed much like its adult namesake. Overall, the PANAS-C, like the adult PANAS, is a brief, useful measure that can be used to differentiate anxiety from depression in youngsters. As such, this instrument addresses the shortcomings of existing measures of childhood anxiety and depression.

Great Britain, ^University of Georgia, and ^University of Illinois \bstract-/I sample of ISO recently married couples provided data egarding marital satisfaction and depressive symptoms Approximateh 18 months later, 116 of these couples provided complet formation on marital satisfaction and depression once again The data ere examined using three sets of causal models, which yielded con-'.rging results For men, causal paths emerged from depression to antal satisfaction, whereas for women causal paths were from satfaction to depression The results are discussed m relation to the marital discord model of depressionAlthough the association between mantal distress and depressive symptomatology has long mtngued mantal researchers, several issues concerning this association remain unresolved Perhaps one of the most important is whether the relation is causal and the direction of possible causal effects A second issue is the extent to which gender influences the association between mantal discord and depression, an important consideration m view of widely documented gender differences in depression (eg Nolen-Hoeksema, 1987) Finally, vanation in the discord-depression association across data collection strategies and data analytic techniques makes it important to select populations that are relatively homogeneous and to use statistical procedures most sensitive to the ldenufication of causal effects (Kamey & Bradbury, 1995, Monroe & Depue, 1991 The present study therefore examines the relation between mantal discord and depressive symptoms in recently wed spouses at two points in time separated by an 18-month

Although the association between marital conflict and child adjustment problems has been well documented, there is no empirical evidence that conflict actually causes maladjustment. The investigation of causation requires theoretically and empirically informed longitudinal research. Two topics are addressed to facilitate such research. First, how marital conflict may lead to adjustment problems is outlined, with a focus on constructs that are likely to be critical to any theory on this topic. Second, several issues are identified that need to be addressed in longitudinal research on the mechanisms underlying the link between marital and child problems.

In these two studies, the authors used children's perceptions of family relationships to examine simultaneously direct and indirect links between marital conflict and child adjustment. With data pertaining to 146 sixth and seventh graders, Study 1 supported direct and indirect effects of perceptions of marital conflict on internalizing behaviors, and indirect effects for externalizing behaviors. In Study 2, data analyzed from 451 families showed indirect effects of marital conflict and parent-to-child hostility, through adolescent perceptions of such behavior, on both current distress and distress 12 months later in 3 of 4 models estimated. Direct and indirect effects were found for boys' concurrent internalizing behavior. Implications and limitations of both studies are discussed to address the need for a more sophisticated theoretical approach to examine why an association exists between marital conflict and child adjustment.

This study investigated spouse expectations immediately prior to a marital interaction and also examined whether the accessibility of evaluative judgments about the partner and the marriage advances understanding of marital satisfaction and its correlates. Ninety-two couples participated in the study. As hypothesized, marital satisfaction correlated with preinteraction expectations of partner behavior and with current affect, and expected partner behavior mediated the relation between satisfaction and affect. Response latency to make evaluative judgments of the partner and the marriage moderated the relation between satisfaction and expected partner behavior for husbands. The findings are integrated with basic research on attitudes, and their clinical implications are outlined.